Geosynchron (10 page)

Natch opens another Confidential Whisper channel with his erstwhile enemy. "If you expect me to go along with all of this, then I'm
going to need some answers."

Petrucio's been gazing out the window for the last half hour, lost
in reflection. "Would you prefer to stay in Sao Paulo and wait for the
Council to show up?" he replies, deadpan.

"No. But maybe I'd rather not wait until we land to use this
dartgun." He holds up the weapon and points it at Petrucio's forehead.
A can't-miss shot at this range. "Maybe I'd rather shoot you right now
and dump you in the middle of the ocean. For fuck's sake-you imprisoned me, Petrucio. Just because you decided to let me go doesn't mean
I'm going to forget this."

Petrucio's face sparks into a grin. For some reason, extreme adversity always seems to bring out the jester in him. "All right, what do
you want to know?"

"These defensive programs you've been building. MultiReal-D. If
I'm going to stay a step ahead of Magan Kai Lee and Len Borda, I need
to know what they are."

"Fair enough." Petrucio stretches, sits up, and gives his most
serious stare while Natch lowers the gun back to his lap. Natch is
under no illusion that his threats have convinced Petrucio of anything.
It's obvious that the programmer resolved to impart this information
to Natch as soon as he burst into that SeeNaRee room and shot his
brother in the back.

Petrucio narrows his eyes for a few seconds, trying to decide where
to begin. "Tell me how you can use MultiReal," he says, "to reverse
death."

Natch again resists the urge to rub the spot on his neck where he
should have met his mortality. "I don't know," he replies.

"Now you're just being lazy," chides Petrucio. "You've had Margaret's program for months. You haven't spent the entire time dodging
black code darts, have you? You must have thought some of these
things through. Suppose the lieutenant executive of the Defense and
Wellness Council gives you unlimited funding to build a MultiReal
program that reverses death. How do you do it?"

Natch drops a token thought or two on the problem. "Impossible,"
he shrugs. "Or at least, that's what you want me to say."

Again, the wry smile. "Frederic and I thought it was impossible
too, at first. Time only moves in one direction, right? Prengal Surina
proved that. But then I had an inspiration. If you send a multi projection into a real building, and that real building collapses on top of you,
do you die? No, of course not-because you're not actually in the
building in the first place. It's just an illusion. Neurons firing."
Petrucio taps the side of his head with one finger. "When the building
collapses, the multi network can sense trauma coming an instant
before it happens. It cuts off your projection and you wind up standing
on your red tile again. So I thought: if you can project a virtual body
into space ... why not project a virtual body into time?"

"That doesn't make any sense," says Natch, shaking his head. "Virtual time? What would that even look like?"

"Tell me what time it is."

"What-"

Petrucio cuts him off. "You'll find out. Just tell me what time it
is.

The entrepreneur turns his attention to the internal clock that has
been acting as metronome for the bio/logic symphony in constant performance since the hour of his birth. "It's 10:04 a.m. Sao Paulo time."

Petrucio puts the palms of his hands together and touches his fingertips to his nose. "You're sure about that."

Natch makes no response. Ever since he hit number one on
Primo's, ever since he got enmeshed in Margaret Surina's tangled skein
of MultiReal programming, all of the sureties in his life have been vanishing one by one. Career, friends, ideals. Why should time be the
exception?

"In actuality," continues Patel, his demeanor maddeningly placid,
"it's 10:03. You want to know what virtual time looks like? You, my
friend, are living in it."

Natch grips the armrest of his seat as his stomach does backflips.
He remembers the feeling of queasy vertigo that wormed through his
extremities when Brone and Pierre Loget demonstrated how he could
stand in two places at once. He's suffered this primordial shock so often
these past few months it should almost feel commonplace by now. But
no matter how hard he tries, Natch simply can't adjust to this new
world of constant gut-wrenching change. "You did this to me," he
mutters over ConfidentialWhisper. "At the Tul Jabbor Complex. The
black code you hit me with when I jumped on the hoverbird."

Petrucio gives the slightest nod of affirmation. "Magan's idea," he
says.

"This doesn't help me at all. So my clock's out of sync. I still have
no idea why that matters."

"Let's take a step back." The programmer settles deeper into his
seat and waves one hand in the air like a professor diving into a
didactic lecture. "What does MultiReal do? It lets you explore alternate realities in your mind, before they happen. Glorified probability
calculation, right? Run the program with someone else present, and it
becomes a collaborative process. You still see the potential realities,
but now the other person is effectively telling you what they're going
to do, before they do it. MultiReal can project all this much, much
faster than real time, because it's all just mathematical calculations in
your head." Petrucio points again to his own head, with its neatly
combed slick of hair. "Once you've chosen the reality you want, you
still need to make it actual. It hasn't happened yet; it's just potential.
So you close the choice cycle and turn that possibility into a reality. If
we're using the baseball analogy ... you choose where you want the
ball to go. You close the choice cycle. MultiReal tells your body to hit
the baseball just like so, and tells the other person's body to catch it, or
not catch it. You with me so far?"

"Yes."

"It only takes a fraction of a second for your brain to project all those realities and for you to make a choice. But the actual hitting and
catching of the baseball takes several seconds. So what are you doing
during those several seconds?"

Natch frowns. "I don't know. You're acting out the choice, I
suppose."

"Sure. But who says your mind can't continue onward? While your
body is hitting the ball and running for first base, why can't MultiReal
just keep calculating further into the future? Why not keep going for
a whole sixty seconds-and why not stay sixty seconds ahead of
everyone else?"

The entrepreneur has no answer.

"If you did this continuously, without stopping, then you'd effectively be living in the future, wouldn't you? One minute in the future.
As long as life conforms to the probability calculations in your head,
the outside world would unspool in `real time' behind you. All of your
interactions with the people around you would happen ahead of time
in that collaborative virtual space. Even when unpredictable things do
happen, the program can usually just back up and weave those things
into the virtual fabric. MultiReal can erase those nascent memories, so
nobody would be the wiser-including you."

"It's a neat trick," says Natch, "but I still don't see how that's
going to reverse-" He stops short.

Petrucio's face blooms into a massive smile. "You're starting to see
it, aren't you? Anything that happens during that sixty secondssomeone shooting you with a dartgun, someone pushing you off a
ledge-"

"Frederic cutting off my head with a samurai sword," grumbles
Natch.

11
-it hasn't really happened yet, right? It's just a possibility you're
exploring in your head. A collaborative fantasy. You've still got time
to alter your path and avoid that future. So back to our original
analogy. If you're a multi projection standing in a building when it collapses, the system cuts you off and brings you back to reality. Same
thing here. If someone decapitates you with a sword ..."

"You get snapped back to `real' time, one minute in the past."

"Exactly."

Natch stands up abruptly, tries to pace in the cramped hoverbird
cabin. Now that he's caught the scent, his mind is charging ahead, galloping through the possibilities with furious speed. From the pilot's
chair, Hiro starts to turn around to see what's going on, then thinks
better of it and disappears back into his mocha grind haze.

"You told me MultiReal-D erases nascent memories," says Natch.
"Then why do I still remember Frederic swinging that sword at my
neck?"

"Did you see the syringe he injected you with?"

"Yes."

"Modified OCHREs, for testing. So you'd remember the whole
thing."

Natch's mind is reeling. It's insane, ludicrous, borderline nonsensical-but if he accepts the original premise of MultiReal, where's the
logical break? There is none. It follows. And furthermore ...

"A bio/logic program can't really know when you're about to die,"
he says over ConfidentialWhisper, more to himself than to Petrucio.
"All MultiReal-D can do is guess. All it can do is take your sensory
input and calculate the probability of death, based on the factors it's
given."

"Correct."

"So if someone shoots you in the back, or poisons your food, or
pushes you over a cliff when you're not looking ... If you can't see the
assassin coming, and he's not looped in to your collaborative process,
then MultiReal-D provides no defense."

Petrucio purses his lips thoughtfully. "True."

"Yet if you can see death coming ... somebody could take advantage of that. That person could set up a SeeNaRee environment where you're completely surrounded by certain death. Every time you get
close to the edge of the room, a guillotine comes down from the ceiling
and cuts you in half. It's not a real guillotine, but you don't know that.
As long as your brain thinks you're going to die, MultiReal-D will keep
yanking you back a minute into the past-into the present-every
time. The potential memories would get erased. You'd be trapped."

Petrucio extends his hands behind his head and puts his heels up
on the seat that Natch has just vacated. He seems extraordinarily
pleased with himself. "Clever, isn't it?" he says. "But don't give me the
credit for that idea-that was all Frederic's doing."

Natch's mind won't stop its mad charge through the possibilities, as if
trying to make up for lost time. He's been in the dark for so longboth literally and figuratively-he feels like he must continue pressing
on until all the questions are answered.

He wheels on Petrucio and extends an accusatory finger. "You're
still not telling me everything. Someone tried to kill me in Old
Chicago."

The programmer has quickly moved from satisfied to pleasantly
exhausted, and seems on the verge of slipping into a nap. "We think
so, yes. That's why Magan had me put the code in you to begin with.
To protect you, and to track you."

"I don't understand this. I'm standing on the street in Chicago
when someone tries to kill me. The program stops calculating my
future and snaps me back a minute in the past, to `real time.' But what
if in real time, I'm still standing on the same street with the person who's
trying to kill me? Neither of us would know any better, because our
memories have been erased. So why wouldn't we do the same thing
over and over again until our OCHREs wore out? Why wouldn't he
just try to kill me again?"

"Ah," says Petrucio playfully. "Here's where things get fun. We
think he did."

"So then what happened?"

"Nothing happened. Things unhappened."

Natch simply gapes at the programmer.

Petrucio, though caught in a sleep spiral, is clearly happy at the
entrepreneur's befuddlement. He has the same kind of brain as Horvil,
one that derives pleasure from tough logical conundrums and mathematical challenges. "You're right," says Petrucio, letting out an enormous yawn. "The program's not all that useful unless you can solve
that problem. But it's not as difficult as it sounds. During the whole
time that MultiReal-D is active and calculating the future ... why not
keep a record of everything that's happening? Keep the whole memory
trail stored in case you get caught in an endless loop of attack and
reprisal. If that happens, start backtracking."

"How?"

"By undoing everything you've done." Petrucio interrupts Natch's
budding protest with another yawn. "Impossible? Hardly. We live in
a virtual world, Natch. Memories can be erased. Vault transactions can
be reversed. Posts on the Data Sea can be taken down. You can
rearrange the furniture in your apartment by editing a database entry.
You can move your multi projection back to the same place you were
standing yesterday with the blink of an eye. You'd be surprised how
many of your actions can easily be reversed."

"Until?"

"Until the program finds a point in the past when you're no longer
in imminent danger."

Natch catches himself on the ceiling of the hoverbird, feeling as if
he's about to faint. Margaret Surina promised in her big speech before
the world to eliminate the tyranny of cause and effect-and from all
appearances, her program has done just that.